The “One True Christian” of His Age?
What inspired you to write Spider in a Tree? I live in Northampton, Massachusetts, across the…
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The Battle To Define ‘Avatar Spirituality’
A new book of essays on the meaning of Avatar, is a down-in-the-dirt wrestling match between those who resonate with it and those who hate a film that’s been labeled pro-civilization and anti-civilization, pro-science and anti-science, un-American and too American, feminist and misogynistic, leftist and neoconservative, and pagan, atheistic, theistic, and animistic.
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Arab Spring: Countering the Naysayers
What inspired you to write The Future of the Arab Spring? The Arab revolutions, which began…
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Meditation is Not Religion or Spirituality—It’s Technology
Meditation is not religion, not spirituality—it’s a technology of upgrading the mind that can enrich one’s life, including one’s religious life. We’re used to the idea of physical fitness. Time to get used to the idea of contemplative fitness, and practice at least as diligently.
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How New Religions Are Made
“For me, the process of writing this book was a real eye-opener that demonstrated that even small, some might say, “marginal” religious groups are connected in so many ways to so many other groups, crossing lines of space, race, and time. It led me to rethink the utility of the “marginal” and to discover just how rich those religions are as a way of understanding the world.”
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Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?
Religions are richly variable in their organizations, belief systems, rituals, and practices. This is true…
Read MoreA Memoir of Jewish, Transgender Spirituality
What inspired you to write Through the Door of Life? Early in my gender transition…
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Nadia Bolz-Weber on Becoming ‘God’s Bitch’
“The book is vulnerable, to have all these stories about myself and these truths about myself out there. It’s not like the book is going to impress anyone—nobody’s going to say, ‘Wow, Nadia Bolz-Weber is a fucking spiritual giant.'”
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Do Intelligent People Need Religion?
A new analysis of decades of studies concludes that religious people tend to be less intelligent, while a new book by Eastern Orthodox intellectual David Bentley Hart suggests that “the absolutely convinced atheist” is not an uncompromising intellectual, but rather “someone who has failed to notice something very obvious.”
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Creationism 3.0: Meet Intelligent Design’s Huckster
With a PhD in philosophy of science from Cambridge, the author of the latest argument for intelligent design isn’t your typical creationist hack, but he is something of a huckster; the flaw in his argument is difficult to spot because it is so blatantly obvious.
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